EARLY

HISTORY OF
MULTIMEDIA
 Early History of Multimedia
A brief history of the use of multimedia to communicate ideas
might begin with newspapers, which were perhaps the first
mass communication medium, using text, graphics, and
images.
Before still-image camera was invented, these graphics and
images were generally hand-drawn.
 Imaging
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
captured the first natural image
from his window in 1826 using a
sliding wooden box camera.
Later, Alphonse Giroux built the
first commercial camera with a
double-box design.
Fig.1.1 A vintage dry-plate camera. E&H T Anthony model
Champion, Circa 1890
 Audio
Thomas Alva Edison’s
phonograph, invented in
1877, was the first device
that was able to record
and reproduce sound.
It originally recorded
sound onto a tinfoil sheet
phonograph cylinder

An Edison phonograph, model GEM.

 Audio
The phonographs were
later improved by
Alexander Graham Bell.
Emile Berliner further
transformed the
phonograph cylinders to
gramophone records.
 Audio
The gramophone record was one of the
dominant audio recording formats
throughout much of the twentieth
century.

From the mid 1980s, phonograph use

declined sharply because of the rise of
audio tapes, and later the Compact Disc
(CD) and other digital recording formats.
 Evolution of Audio Storage
Media

Left to right an Edison cylinder record, a flat vinyl record, a reel-to-reel

magnetic tape, a cassette tape, and a CD
 Video
Motion pictures were originally
conceived of in the 1830s to
observe motion too rapid for
perception by the human eye.
Edison again commissioned the
invention of a motion picture
camera in 1887. Silent feature
films appeared from 1910 to
1927.
 Television and Radio
In 1895, Guglielmo Marconi
conducted the first wireless radio
transmission at Pontecchio, Italy,
and a few years later (1901), he
detected radio waves beamed
across the Atlantic. Initially
invented for telegraph, radio is
now a major medium for audio
broadcasting.
Television and Radio
Television, or TV for short, was the new medium for the twentieth century.
 Hypermedia, WWW, and Internet
The World Wide Web
(WWW or simply
Web) is the best
example of a
hypermedia
application, which is
also the largest.
 Hypermedia, WWW, and Internet

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee proposed

the World Wide Web to CERN
(European Center for Nuclear
Research) as a means for organizing
and sharing their work and
experimental results.

His team invented the Hypertext

Markup Language (HTML) and the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for
this purpose, too.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium
2000
WWW size was estimated at over one billion pages. Sony
unveiled the first Blu-ray Disc prototypes in October
2000, and the first prototype player was released in
April 2003 in Japan.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium
2001

The first peer-to-peer file sharing

(mostly MP3 music) system, Napster,
was shut down by court order, but
many new peer- to-peer file sharing
systems, e.g., Gnutella, eMule, and Shawn Fanning

BitTorrent, were launched in the An American Computer programmer,

Entrepreneur, and angel investor.

following years.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium

2003

Skype was released for free peer-to-peer voice over

the Internet..
 Multimedia in the New Millennium

2004
Web 2.0 was recognized as a new
way to utilize software developers
and end-users use the Web (and is
not a technical specification for a
new Web).

Facebook, the most popular online

social network, was founded by Mark
Zuckerberg.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium
2005
YouTube was created, providing an easy portal for video
sharing, which was purchased by Google in late 2006.
Google launched the online map service, with satellite
imaging, real- time traffic, and Streetview being added later.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium

2006
Twitter was created, and rapidly gained worldwide popularity,
with 500 million registered users in 2012, who posted 340
million tweets per day..
 Multimedia in the New Millennium

2007
Apple launched the first generation of iPhone, running the iOS mobile
operating system.
Google unveiled Android mobile operating system, along with the founding of the
Open Handset Alliance.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium

2009

The first LTE (Long Term Evolution)

network was setup in Oslo, Norway, and
Stockholm, Sweden, making an
important step toward 4G wireless
networking.

James Cameron’s film, Avatar, created a

surge on the interest in 3D video.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium

2010
Netflix, which used to be a DVD
rental service provider, migrated
its infrastructure to the Amazon
AWS cloud computing platform,
and became a major online
streaming video provider.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium

2012

HTML5 subsumes the

preview version, HTML4,
which was standardized
in 1997.
 Multimedia in the New Millennium

2013
Sony released its PlayStation 4, a video
game console that is to be integrated
with Gaikai, a cloud-based gaming
service that offers streaming video
game content.

4K resolution TV started to be available

in the consumer market.